The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.

I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, after all, to be a traveler.

... the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.

You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.

It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians.

The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning.

Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari; Africans don't.